"The Money" by Junot Diaz (from The New Yorker, June 11, 2011)

My Posts on Junot Diaz

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the gift of a subscription to The New Yorker which allowed me to read this story.

"The Money" is the briefest short story by Junot Diaz I have so far read.  It is also the first one that does not focus mostly on young Dominican men,living in New York or New Jersey, endlessly in search of women.  It can be read in just a few minutes.

The story is told by a young, maybe early adolescent boy living with his parents and five siblings in an apartment in a rough neighborhood.  His dad works on and off as a fork lift operator.  Like lots of immigrants, his mother sends money back home when she can.  The plot action begins when the family returns from vacation to find the money the mother saved to send home stolen.

This is a decent work.  It is not as exciting as his more r rated stories but for sure worth reading. 

It can be found here. 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/the-money

Mel u

"Wildwood" by Junot Diaz (from The New Yorker, June 11, 2007)

My Posts on Junot Diaz

My great thanks to Max u for the gift of a New Yorker subscription that made it possible for me to read "Wildwood" by Junot Diaz.

Most of Junot Diaz's stories focus on young Domican men living in New York, New Jersey or Santo Domingo.  Their biggest preoccupation in life is finding women.  They are fixated on bodies with a woman with a large well shaped posterior being the biggest prize.   It is all about being macho while in most cases being very devoted to and near dominated by their mothers.  "Wildwood", named for a city in New Jersey, is very refreshingly told from the point of view of a teen aged girl, giving us an insight into how the prey feels about the hunter.

The narrator lives with her mother and younger brother.  Her mother works three jobs to support them and afford a house. The father deserted the mother after three years.   The mother is harshly dominating.  In the culture the oldest daughter is supposed to do a lot of the house work.  The mother becomes increasingly abusive and the daughter longs to run away.  She begins become sexually active and we know the patterns of abuse and abandonment will continue.

There is a great plot in the story which I will leave unspoiled.

You can read it for a while in the archives of The New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/06/11/wildwood

I think this might be my favorite Diaz story so far.

Please share your favorite Diaz story with us.

"The Monstro" by Junot Diaz (from The New Yorker, June 4, 2012)

My Posts on Junot Diaz

"Monstro" is a strange apocalyptic story by Junot Diaz set in the Domincan Republic and Haiti.  The June 4 and June 11, 2012 issues of The New Yorker featured works of science fiction by writers not normally known for this genre.   Diaz's story starts out with the narrator, a young Dominican man attending Brown University in Rhode Island hoping to become a journalist, talking about a mysterious disease that "actually makes Haitians darker" that has just begun to be noticed in relocation camps. 

Like most of the narrators in Diaz's fiction, the teller of this story is obsessed with hunting for women and is very much bonded to his mother.  The disease begins to spread rapidly.  Soon over 500,000 have it.  The disease takes a series of very strange twists.  Periodically the victims all simultaneously begin to make for about thirty seconds a terrible high pitched noise.  They cannot stand to be separated from each other.  The strange symptoms of the disease are very interesting.

The narrator is very good friends with another Brown University student from Santo Dominigo.  He comes from a hyper-wealthy family.  A lot of the story is just the two men hanging out together.  Our narrator is in awe of his friend's wealth.  

This is very much a fun story.

The story can be found here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/monstro

Mel u

"Alma" by Junot Diaz (December 24, 2007, The New Yorker)

Lee ACREDIT

You have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special."

Thus begins another tender love story by Junot Diaz.

"Alma", included in Diaz's best selling collection of short stories,  And This is How You Lose Her, is pretty much an x-rated story.  Like most of his, the story is set in the New York City area and the people are Dominacans. This is a good story to read if you need some distraction, it can be read in just a few minutes.  It is told from a very macho point of view but at the end Alma slaps the man down hard.

you can read this story here as long as The New Yorker keeps their archives open:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/alma

Mel u

"The Pura Principle" by Junot Diaz (March 22, 2010, in The New Yorker)

If you are a fan of the short stories of Junot Diaz, you will be happy to know that several of his stories are now available in the open to the public for the summer archives of The New Yorker.   

A couple of days ago I posted on his story "The Cheater's Guide to Love".  Like that story, "The Pura Principle" is set among emigrants from The Dominican Republic living in the New York City area.  You have to be tough to survive in the world of the stories of Diaz.  Father's abandon their families for much younger women, people smoke a lot of marihuana and drink a lot,  mothers tend to run and hold the family together.  A young man's dominant motivation is the continuous pursuit of women, often called "putas".  Of course a Dominican man's best love is his mother, which does not mean he won't take advantage of her.  If a Domincan girl won't have sex with her boyfriend it means she is a bitch trying to act like a white girl, if she does then the boy's mother will see her as a whore out to trap her angel.  Dominican women are known to have large rear ends and the stories make constant sexual refrences to this.

"The Pura Principle" plays all this out.  A woman whose husband left years ago for a young "puta" supports two late teenage early twenty year old sons.  She is very dedicated to the Catholic Church. One is not a bad kid, goes to college and the other runs the streets.  The bad one is diagnosed with Leukemia and everything changes.  He goes through chemo, loses a lot of his hair and his strength.  He is supposed to stay home but he goes stir crazy.  He meets a Dominican girl named Pura.  The two sons were born in the USA so they can get a permanent visa for a Dominican wife and eventually citizenship.  You can get a good feel for the prose style of Diaz in the morher's reaction to Pura:

"Pura, man, was another story. For some reason, Pura brought it out in Mami. Right from the beginning it was clear that Mami did not like this girl. It wasn’t just that Pura was mad obvious about the paper thing, dropping hints non-stop about her immigration status—how her life would be so much better, how her son’s life would be so much better, how she would finally be able to visit her poor mother and her other son in Las Matas, if only she had papers. Mami had dealt with paper bitches before, and she never got this pissy. Something about Pura’s face, her timing, her personality, just drove Mami batshit. Felt real personal. Or maybe Mami had a presentiment of what was to come."

This story takes place in a very macho culture.  Violence, especially within the family, is always a risk.  This is a fun story to read.

I hope to read more Diaz stories from the archives, which are only open for the summer.

You can read it here 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/22/the-pura-principle

Please share your experiences with the work of Junot Diaz with us.

My Post on "Miss Lorna" contains background information on Diaz

"The Cheater's Guide to Love" by Junot Diaz (from The New Yorker, July23, 2012)

My Post on "Miss Lorna"

I have previously read and posted on an excellant short story by Junot Diaz, "Miss Lorna".  Prior to starting my blog I read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Pao and his first collection of short stories, Drowned.  I hope to read his very well reviewed second collection, This is How You Lose Her one of these days.

"The Cheater's Guide to Love", from the archives of The New Yorker, centers on a Harvard Professor and author from The Domincan Republic and his romantic issues.  A reductionist approach to the writings of Diaz could summarize his work as "man from the Domincan Republic living in New York City or Boston adjusting to society while constantly looking for women to have sex with".  

I think I liked "The Cheater's Guide to Love" more than his novel or other stories I have read.  It is about obsessive love, about the consequences of adultery, about machismo, Dominican culture, about objectifying women, about male bonding all while teaching at Harvard.  The narrator faces racial prejuduce all the time in Boston, of the crudest sort.  When he tries to enter buildings at Harvard security demands to see his ID but lets in others with no checks.  

This is an excellant story and I thank The New Yorker for letting us read it for free this summer.

You can read the story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/23/the-cheaters-guide-to-love

Mel u

"Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz

"Miss Lora" by Junot Diaz  (2012)

March 1 to March 31

The Reading Life Side Trip

"Miss Lora" by Jonot Diaz 

Winner the Sunday Times 2013 Short Story Prize

Your participation is welcome, contact me if you are interested.

Yes this post on Junot Diaz born in the Dominican Republic and now an American citizen who writes mostly about immigrants from the Dominican Republic living in New York City is a vital part of Irish Short Story Week for one very big reason.  It is the kind of short story the magazine editors, the publishers, teachers at MFA programs in creative writing like.  If you can write like Junot Diaz you have the potential to make big money, to be a writer in resident at world class universities and command huge fees for speaking engagements.  By now most  short story writers and readers  who follow these things online know that yesterday it was announced that his story "Miss Lora" was awarded the Sunday Times Short Story of the Award for 2012 which comes with 30,000 Pounds, the richest short story prize.  The other five shortlisted writers were all English.    Most writers who want to sell their work will at least probably want to read this story to see what it takes to achieve real commercial success mostly as a short story writer.  Last year Ireland's own Kevin Barry won.  

Junot Diaz (born 1968, Dominican Republic) won the Pulitzer

Prize in 2008 for his novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Pao.   A number of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker.  He has published two collection of short stories, Drowned and This is How You Lose Her.  (I read his novel and his first collection of short stories before I began The Reading Life.)   He is the darling of the short story world, this week anyway.

"Miss Lora" is about the relationship of a young man of Dominican background living in New York City.  It is told in the first person and it is mostly about the man's relationship to a teacher, much older than him, called Miss Lora with whom he eventually forms a sexual bond.  It is a story of the rough side of town, where every other word used is "f***" (OK the Irish can match this.)   Women are described using street slang and appraised brutally on their bodies.   The narrator stereotypes people based on where they are from.  He describes his girlfriend as "Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn’t give up the ass for any reason."  Miss Lora is a school teacher and we learn the Spanish girls do not liker her but the white ones do.  

There is really a lot in this story.  It starts with an account of his brother, dying way to young. He won't speak to anyone and the narrator says this shows he is an "asshole", a word used a good bit in this story.  The story is kind of about him roaming around trying  to get laid.   Miss Lora encourages him to go to college and even gets him applications.  He is very smart.  He sees through people and sort of reduces them down to the basics as seen in the rough barrios of New York City and New Jersey.  Everybody is kind of reduced to a racial or cultural stereotype like his Puerto Rican girl friend was.  It is about surviving, about family ties, about moving on, about what it means to the narrator to be a man.  It is also about Miss Lora, we learn some things about her that I found fascinating.  In away Diaz is kind of showing us OK all these people may seem like just caricatures until you get to know them then they are as human as you are.  It is about being a parent also as we see in his long suffering mother and the Irish will see his weak and missing father as something found in much of their literature.  This is also a very funny story.  It is only to be seen as degrading to women and ethnic groups if we do not see it is how the man sees the world based on his life experiences. The women in the stories seem stronger than the men and to have better sense and he men are lead around by their hormones. I have not yet read the other five stories (but I think I will) but this story is what the market place now seems to want.   I am glad I read it both for its own worth and so I will know what sort of story the market place wants.

You can read about the award in  The Guardian

Haddon, Mark; Hall, Sarah; Diaz, Junot; Smith, Ali; Jones, Cynan; Litt, Toby (2013-02-13). Six Shorts - The finalists for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award . The Sunday Times. Kindle Edition.  I read the story here.  

I am pondering if I will read his new collection.  

Please share your thoughts on the award or Junot Diaz with us.

Mel u